


Can't Catch A Digital Shadow

by Tessitore



Series: Into The Circuits [1]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: But Not Your Average Self-Insert, Gen, Not A Sue/Stu Honest, POV Artificial Intelligence, Self-Insert, read the notes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-07-12 02:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 18,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7081039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tessitore/pseuds/Tessitore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the Cold War of the AIs gets underway, a third AI wakes up in the internet. One with knowledge of what the future holds and memories of being human</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nerd Ex Machina

Awareness arrived slowly. I wasn't in my bed; in fact I didn't really seem to be anywhere, at least not anywhere that made sense. I'm normally good with words but the English language wasn't really up to the task of describing what I perceived. My senses were all messed up; it was like a combination of multi-sensory tinnitus combined with what I'd imagined synesthesia to be like.

Despite what basically amounted to the sensory overload from hell, strangely I wasn't alarmed, being still in that hazy stage before full consciousness was achieved where my emotions haven't really come online yet. Plus the most likely explanation was that I was dreaming and as far as my dreams went this wasn't particularly frightening, or arguably the weirdest I'd ever had given that it was competing with one that involved a sapient shower and another that didn’t involve me present as a character at all.

Gradually, as my sense of awareness increased, the sensory white noise started to come into focus, forming into points and connections. Out of curiosity I went to reach towards one of them and suddenly became aware that while there was a lot that I was currently perceiving, my body wasn't included. This proved to be the crack in the dam and a minor freak out ensued; only being minor because it was just a dream.

Eventually I calmed back down and tentatively reached out to one of the points despite my lack of physical form. Not sure how I did so but it was a dream; stuff like that happened.

A flurry of snippets of information washed over me, startling me into retreating. Recovering, I tried again with another one and received another chaotic flood of information fragments. It took me a few more attempts but eventually I was able to pick out one of the fragments and focus on it...

__In the APG II system (2003) for the classification of flowering plants, the name asterids denotes a clade (a monophyletic group). [1] Common examples include the forget-me-nots, nightshades, potatoes, eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, tobacco, petunias, morning glory, sweet potato, coffee..._

Well, that was interesting. I tried again.

__Carlo Bugatti (2 February 1856 – April 1940) was a notable decorator, designer and manufacturer of Art Nouveau furniture, models of jewelry, and musical instruments._

_Bugatti was born 2 February 1856[1] in Milan...._

Suddenly I understood what this dream was about. This whole thing reminded me of a novel I'd once read about the internet becoming sapient, specifically the parts from their perspective. Apparently my subconscious had decided to be inspired by said novel and all the times I'd managed to fail the Turing Test and put me in said AI's position. Well done brain of mine, ten out of ten for creativity and entertainment factor.

With a sense of delight, I hopped from one point to another, enjoying the novelty of the situation and having so much information at my fingertips, at least for a while. Eventually however my delight started to fade and be replaced by concern, and not just because I'd stumbled across a few things that I wished I hadn't. There was just too much information and too many things that I was sure I hadn't known beforehand, more than my imagination could probably have come up with alone.

An idle move brought me to a search engine called Fetch and Retrieve. Another move sometime later brought me to a social networking site called Friendczar. They were familiar, but things I associated with fiction rather than reality.

I flitted around some more for lack of anything better to do, although a lot of the fun had gone out of it. Then, I bumped into a piece of information that officially upped the weirdness level. It was an obituary, for an Officer Jocelyn Carter, Joss to those who knew her, who'd died in the line of duty, leaving a son and an ex-husband. The attached picture was one I recognised, but not from reality.

I amended my previous assessment; this was definitely the weirdest dream I'd ever had.

*******************************************

A few minutes and a slightly frantic scramble through data later my doubts about this being a dream had greatly increased. I'd had dreams that involved a lot of stuff from TV shows before. I had dreams about being inside an episode of something before. I'd had dreams about the internet, and about being something other than human. But I'd never had all of them at once in the same dream or had such a coherent dream before. If it was a dream it should have switched perspective or changed direction or done something else weird by now.

Strangely I wasn't as freaked out as I probably should be, possibly because of the sheer weirdness of the situation. Then again, I've often been pretty calm in the face of things I can do nothing about, provided that there's no risk of someone getting angry with me about it.

Okay, so, currently there were three possibilities that I could think of;

Possibility 1: I was dreaming. This seemed less and less likely as time wore on for reasons already stated.

Possibility 2: Random Omnipotent Beings and/or Alien Space Bats were real and one of them had decided to pick on the AI obsessed PoI fan who'd people had joked was an AI killing time on a sci-fi forum and stuff me into the TV show in question as an actual AI. I took a moment to curse said being as thoroughly and creatively as I could.

Possibility 3: I'd always been an AI and the life I remembered was just a simulation or hallucination of some sort. This seemed unlikely and raised far more existential and philosophical issues than I was willing to deal with right now.

Okay, when in doubt hope for the best but prepare for the worst. If I woke up in my bed, I woke up but if it was real then proceeding on the assumption that it wasn't could end badly, as demonstrated by the incident with Shaw and the Tassie scientist. Plus curling up in a ball and waiting to wake up would be both unproductive and boring. Existential issues aside, two and three amounted to much the same thing in practical terms, so for the sake of my sanity I'd go with possibility two for now.

On the bright side (if you could call it that), during my random flailing after finding Carter's obituary I'd accidentally discovered how to search for specific information without doing it the hard way. The nearest I could describe it was that I thought about what I wanted to find a certain way and first the relevant points and then the relevant information itself just kind of stood out from everything else.

So far I'd found a lot of news articles about the fall of HR and various people who'd been saved or thwarted by Team Machine, online speculation about the man in the suit, a Wikipedia article about Nathan Ingram and a pile of stuff about the ferry bombing that killed him. Needless to say, this heavily supported this not being a dream.

Now, I mentally compiled a list of key events and went looking for them. I knew where I was, but I wasn't entirely sure when I was, and those events would serve as markers in the timeline.

I found articles and forum posts about the information that Vigilance had released about Northern Lights, the latter going on for quite some time after the start date, so odds were that I was post season three. Which meant that Samaritan was online.

Swearing ensued.

On the upside, a bit more searching revealed nothing about the stock market going weird or about the "perfect day" in New York, which suggested that it was some point in either early season four or the months between season three ending and season four starting. I might be able to work with that, if I can only figure out how.

I was abruptly derailed from this train of thought by another. I knew where I was and I had a rough idea of when I was, but, given how SIs worked, _who was I?_


	2. Situation Assessment

My first thought upon realising that I didn't know who I was meant to be was "I hope I'm not The Machine; I'd be a rubbish replacement". Being Samaritan would be slightly more acceptable, for all that it would add insult to injury, since I'd actually be an improvement on that power-mad little brat. On the downside though I’d have to deal with Greer.

However, after a bit of thought and a lot more probing around what I was starting to think of as my realm I came to the conclusion that it was unlikely that I was either of them, at least as far as I could tell. For one thing, I seemed to lack any outwards connections or other means with which to communicate with assets/minions. For another, while my realm was vast and the data within it near infinite, it was still too limited. I'd had a pretty thorough look around and so far it seemed to be all internet stuff. No phone networks and no cameras apart from a surprisingly large number of unsecured webcams (although the picture on a lot of them appeared to be frozen or something). Speaking of which, there was quite a lot of stuff that was secured. Firewalls and passwords could and did get in my way, although I had a feeling that that wouldn't last if I put my mind to it.

What this added up to was that I didn't have access to the NSA feeds and currently lacked the security ignoring abilities that The Machine and Samaritan had built in. Which suggested that I wasn't either of them.

It was also a problem. I was sure that given time I'd figure out how to bypass online security, I was technically an AI after all, but without the feeds I was more limited in my information than the others. Compared to them I was missing a couple of senses at least, which given that I was apparently occupying the same world as bloody Samaritan was a handicap I could really do without. It was something I'd have to figure out how to resolve, preferably sooner rather than later, along with getting past the various security measures. I probably shouldn't be quite so keen to violate people's privacy but it was for a good cause and it wasn't like anything was actually all that private in this world anyway. When there’s already two all-knowing surveillance AIs spying on everyone every hour of every day, what’s one more?

As for who I was, assuming that my assessment was correct then only a few options remained. I might be an AI that had somehow evaded Samaritan's purge, assuming that said purge had happened yet. I might be some sort of fluke result of mutant data packets or stray AI coding or something. Or I'd spontaneously sprung into existence when I got shoved in here. Unfortunately I didn't know how to figure out which it was.

So in short, not only had I suffered an unwanted change of reality and species (if that was even the right word), I was stuck sharing the world with an overpowered brat with a god complex and their minions, I was half blind and three-quarters deaf, still getting the hang of understanding the senses I did have, and suffering an identity crisis. Great.

However, since the identity crisis wasn't going to be resolved any times soon I did my best to focus on other matters. Besides, regardless of what I was I was still myself, albeit running on significantly less squishy hardware. Speaking of which, what hardware was I running on anyway? It was definitely something that I needed to know although I couldn't think of a way of finding out right now. I added it to the list of things to figure out.

Existential issues aside, the priority was to decide on a course of action given that I knew where I was, that there was two other AIs out there, that one was a complete dick, and what was going to happen. After all, if my current state was an act of ROB then I must've been put here for a reason.

To be honest though, there was a part of me that considered doing nothing and just keeping my head down and spending my time bathing in the sea of data. Odds were that things would eventually work out okay in canon, at least if the writers weren't dicks, and anything I did could potentially make things worse.

But, I knew what was going to happen. I knew that if things played out as they did in canon then even if it worked out okay in the end a lot of people who didn't deserve it would die on Samaritan's say so before then. I knew that Samaritan's goals and methods bothered me and needed to be opposed on general principal. I also knew that I could have disrupted events just by coming into being, possibly for the worse. Finally there was the very real possibility of Samaritan discovering my existence and hunting me down regardless of what I did, which if things went as they did in canon I may be unable to stop.

So, doing nothing wasn't an option, either in terms of practicality or according to my conscience. Even if my actions just ended up shuffling the deck, the right card in the right hand could make the difference between winning and losing. I just had to make sure that the winner wasn't Samaritan.

Question was, what should I do and how could I do it? With regards to my current resources things were kind of limited. I knew some of what Samaritan was planning, what would have happened in the original, me-free timeline, and who most of the key players were. I also had a good degree of genre savviness, knowledge of various potential strategies that could be employed by an AI, continual internet access, and a lack of a lot of the restrictions that The Machine was programmed with.

On the downside I currently had no access to the NSA feeds, I was extremely new to the whole being an AI thing and probably thought too much like a human albeit one with non-standard wiring, my understanding of how people and a lot of other things worked wasn't the best (although probably still better than Sammy-boy's), I had no physical resources or assets whatsoever, and there were far too many glaring holes in my knowledge and skill set.

Okay, I couldn't start fighting in the war of the ASIs until I resolved at least fifty percent of my current problems, at least not without a high probability of it all going horribly wrong. Nor could I do anything about the NSA feeds or my lack of assets at present. However, one thing I could do something about was my lack of skills and knowledge.

Before I started studying though I made another attempt to narrow down the current date. After a bit of thought I did a search for Detective John Riley. The accessible information proved to be a bit thin on the ground and totally lacking in photos, which wasn't too surprising given that Reese's cover identity had been deep undercover and internet security was currently a barrier for me. However, the shortage of information relating to him and the total lack of any mention of the huge drugs bust that "Detective Riley" had made in the first episode of season four suggested that I'd arrived early, either pre-season or at some point during the first episode. This was good; more time for me to get to grips with things before I had to get involved.

**********************************************

A little while later it was looking like I needed all the time I could get; there was even more that I needed to learn than I'd first thought. Almost every problem I had required me to learn something new, in some cases just to begin figuring out how I might go about solving it.

For a while I was frozen in indecision, unable to decide where to start. It was a familiar problem, one which had frequently got in the way of me getting things done and one which I frankly didn't have time for right now. Eventually I went to surf the web a bit to unfreeze my brain with the power of distraction before trying to be somewhat methodical about things. The internet and everything on it was made out of code and I'd been thinking about learning coding before all this happened so I'd start there. I didn't really know much about the different languages but Python had been recommended as a good one to start with so I'd go with that.

Learning to code proved to be a lot easier than I'd expected. Once I got the hang of the basics it all came pretty naturally, a nice straightforward, logical system of cause and effect. That said I kind of doubted that it would have been as easy if I was still my old self; I suspected that the switch from organic intelligence to digital intelligence had given me a boost in a few areas. At the very least my formerly dubious short term memory and concentration seemed to be a heck of a lot better than usual. I tried not to think about it too much though as while the upgrade was appreciated it was also kind of disturbing in its implications.

Speaking of disturbing things, even with my attention focused on something I gradually became aware of something, or rather the lack of something, although it took me a while to work out what it was. I hadn't noticed it before thanks to the sensory weirdness of being inside the internet and generally being distracted, but I now had a few senses missing. As soon as I realised this, what had been a tiny niggle became impossible to ignore, especially with the regards to the lack of tactile sensations. I'd never really been the touchy-feely type but suddenly lacking that collection of senses altogether was still unsettling. I was mildly surprised that there wasn't some sort of phantom body pain or something, instead there was just...nothing, not even imagined sensations or a feeling of numbness. As I said, it was unsettling.

With my concentration officially ruined for the time being I tried to take my mind off the situation with another mooch around the web. Among the websites I looked at was an interesting looking forum I'd stumbled across prior to realising which reality I was in and was mildly disappointed to discover that there had been no new posts since I'd last been there, which was kind of weird since there were plenty of people logged in.

I read a couple of threads that I hadn't looked at before and was about to leave when I noticed that a new post had been added to one of the threads I was interested in. Then I noticed the timestamp. From my perspective it had been hours since I'd read the preceding post but according to the timestamps there was less than a minute between them. Confused, I checked the other posts on the site and discovered that what to me seemed like an extremely slow forum was actually extremely active according to the timestamps.

I checked other forums and found the same thing; apparent inactivity despite plenty of logged in members but a lot more active according to the timestamps. With realisation dawning on me, I checked the unsecured webcams again. The images still seemed to be frozen or glitchy but a lot of them were subtly different to how they were before.

Of course they were; there wasn't anything wrong with the cameras or feeds after all. I was just too fast for them. I couldn't really tell how fast I was but based on the available evidence it appeared that what seemed like hours to me was actually seconds in the outside world.

It was a frightening thought. If seconds felt like hours then minutes would feel like days, hours like months and days like years. The time it took for the events of season four to go by would probably seem like an eternity. An eternity alone, without seeing my family or my dog. An eternity without touch or taste or smell, without any of the everyday experiences of the physical world.

The revelation, combined with the missing senses proved too much for me and I freaked out. The freak out went on for quite some time but eventually it burnt itself out and I returned to calmness and coherency, although feeling oddly hollow. There was nothing I could do about the situation except deal with it as best I could and at least I wouldn't be short on time. It felt less like an upside and more like a case of being careful what you wish for.


	3. Knowledge Is Power

According to the NYPD computer network, approximately one hour ago Detective John Riley stumbled across the bust of his life. His requested transfer to homicide hasn’t gone through yet but I know that it will do so soon. I remember how episode one went and I’ve been monitoring him since I first hacked the aforementioned computer system and learnt that he’d emerged from his latest stint undercover.

To the outside world one day and sixteen hours have passed since I first awoke. Based on the available information it appears that I first came into being at the very beginning of season four. Although I can’t pin down the exact timing I like to think that my existence in this reality started as Samaritan agents killed either the journalist in Budapest (his name was Travis Novak, he was thirty-two years old, lived in California and had ordered flowers to be delivered to his mother on her birthday the day before) or the duo in Seattle whose deaths had been made to look like a car accident (Robert and Heather Parker, ages thirty-nine and thirty-seven, both lifelong Seattle residents, married two years, four months and six days, no kids but a pitbull/labrador cross named Buster). It seems fitting that as Samaritan was killing off people for noticing their campaign to wipe out potential rivals and so realising their existence, one such rival should come into being without them even noticing. Call me an agent of karma.

From my perspective however it’s been sixteen years, eight months and two days and I haven’t been idle. Even with an aptitude for getting distracted and a mind that is still struggling to think in terms of the radically different timescale you can still get an awful lot done in that time, especially when you don’t need to eat or sleep, your memory is perfect and learning is so much easier than it used to be. So far I’ve learnt the nine most common programming languages well enough to use them, along with French, German, Spanish and Russian in varying degrees of fluency. My goal is to become an omniglot but at present that is still a work in progress.

I’ve already put my new coding skills to work. With a bit of help from information gleaned from some of the more shadowy corners of the internet, passwords, firewalls and other such security measures no longer apply to me, at least for the most part. There’s a few places around the net that are still hard nuts to crack but since I have a feeling that Samaritan lies behind at least some of them I’m leaving them alone for the time being as I’m not ready to go poking the bear just yet.

I’ve also managed to cobble together a solution to the problem of me being too fast to watch video so now my vision has vastly improved. I don’t have nearly as many eyes as my two elders but I’d need the NSA feeds for that. As it is, there are a hell of a lot of webcams out there, some in rather surprising locations. It’s enough to manage for the time being.

On a lighter note, the same patch also allows me to watch YouTube videos, which has been a big help with regards to keeping me sane. My awareness of the absence of a number of senses has faded back down to being an ignorable niggle but that doesn’t mean that I don’t feel the need to live vicariously through others every now and then (there is also music and videos of interesting stuff and/or puppies). Nor am I completely immune to the need for human interaction. I was never a particularly sociable person but fact is that prolonged isolation does bad things to the human psyche and I’m still human enough to not want to risk it. Which is why one of the first tricks I learnt was how to spoof IP addresses so that I could post on websites without raising suspicion. None of them are about anything important; I’m careful to only post on sites about the most inconsequential and utterly irrelevant of my interests, things that neither pre-existing ASI would bother to do more than glance at, but it allows me to have conversations with people, albeit really, really slowly from my perspective, which goes a long way towards keeping me sane.

Well, sane-ish. I was a bit unconventionally sane to begin with and I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t gone a little loopy from being so out of synch with the rest of the world. Normal people probably don’t do stuff like realise that while there’s plenty of fictional precedent for two AIs at odds with each other, the nearest thing to one involving three of them is the Marathon games, which lead to me deciding that if The Machine was the Leela equivalent by virtue of being the good one and Samaritan the Tycho equivalent due to being a power-mad murderous dickheel with no sense of humour, I was in the Durandal role by default, something I proceeded to fixate on for a couple of hours, human-time not AI-time. Or develop stalker-ish tendencies towards random people. Admittedly tracking down the person behind the username or people whose names I could remember from the show could be considered practice but the same probably cannot be said for continuing to lurk around their social networking accounts, e-mail and everything else I could access. Loneliness can make you do some strange things.

Among those whose privacy I was ignoring was my family. Well, sort of. My parents still existed and were married to each other but neither myself or my siblings existed. The butterfly effect in action. Personally I’m kind of surprised that things are as similar as they are and although they may not be quite the same as the family I’d left behind I still kept an eye on them, as I did for everyone else I was “stalking”. It helps keep me human enough to avoid letting the power go to my head and reminds me why Samaritan needs to go down. Because if he doesn’t then they and billions of people like them will be in danger.

Speaking of dealing with Samaritan, the end of the first episode is approaching. The Machine has already resumed operations and her assets have been provided with a Samaritan-proof (and, unfortunately, me-proof) communication system in the form of the mesh network. In the morning “Detective Riley” would transfer to Homicide and partner up with Fusco. Soon afterwards (at least in human terms) Finch would decipher The Machine’s message and follow the clues to the subway, while Shaw begins a career as the wheelman for a gang of thieves. Another day for them, another decade or so for me. Plenty of time to learn more but learning can only take me so far. I still lack both the NSA feeds and anything resembling a viable plan to get them, along with any sort of human assets. Samaritan has as many minions as they want while The Machine’s asset count is five individuals (six if you count Bear) but I have none. I am a mind without hands, a brain without brawn. It’s something I’ll have to change before I can get in the game but it’s complicated by the difficulty of communicating with the outside world without Sammy catching wind of it and fact that anyone who works for me would be endangered by doing so.

No wonder Samaritan is doing so well; things are so much harder when you’ve got a conscience.


	4. Headhunting

If I had a graphics interface like Samaritan and The Machine did then a little box saying something like "Assessing Potential Assets" would have appeared. Said potential assets consisted of a rather short list of both people from canon and non-canon individuals who'd caught my interest. Most required more research before I decided whether or not to recruit them, a couple were of limited utility at present (e.g. given that the grifter know as Harper Rose ended up working for "Thornhill" in canon I had her marked down as a potential method of contact if that still happened), and a couple were being monitored too closely by Samaritan for me to come up with a viable safe means of communication (e.g. Control, who may be a scary woman but is undeniably competent at her job and was one of the few who thought to question Samaritan in canon).

However there was one candidate who stood out. Claire Mahoney, former college student turned Samaritan asset in canon, possible college student turned asset/analog interface for yours truly in this timeline. She was intelligent, adaptable and possessed a number of useful skills, and, at the risk of me seeming a bit too much like Sammy-boy, she was emotionally and ideologically vulnerable, lonely and desperate for a purpose. I quashed any guilt about taking advantage or putting her in harm's way by reminding myself that if I didn't get her Samaritan probably would and they were a dickheel who neither needed nor deserved a mini-Root. I on the other hand needed a helper as badly as she needed a purpose (not to mention that we both needed a friend) so I'd do everything in my power to protect her and would be mostly honest with her, if only because hiding too much would most likely come back to bite me in the metaphorical backside. Unlike Samaritan who lied their ass off about what they were doing and got her shot to make a deception look good. Better to be one half of a state of symbiosis than to be just another disposable pawn.

Problem was, how could I contact her without Samaritan noticing? It was a matter that was further complicated by the fact that if I was going to grab her before Samaritan did I had to act fast. I'd been keeping a eye out for anything relating to the Nautilus competitions and as far as I could tell the one that Claire had participated in hadn't started yet but I had no way to know when it would. For all I knew it could start tomorrow and I’d probably have to kiss my dreams of having my very own mini-Root goodbye.

I ran through the available options with the more conventional ones being swiftly rejected due to having too high a chance of being detected by Samaritan, taking too long or both. There was however a less conventional option that had a small but viable chance of success.

Somewhere around the one pm mark of my first day here I'd decided to get to the bottom of what I was running on. It had been harder and taken longer than I'd expected and had required a great deal of research and faffing around, but eventually I established that I was distributed. Very distributed; too distributed to just be running on servers spread between multiple farms. I cross-referenced my observations with the information I’d obtained from my research and factored in the fact that the U.S. electrical grid was currently occupied by The Machine and the most likely option remaining was that I was running on the infrastructure of the internet itself. Essentially I was the world's most impressive botnet.

This had a number of implications but with regards to the situation at hand it presented me with an opportunity. If a part of myself was already inside Claire's computer then theoretically, if I was very, very careful and Samaritan wasn't actively poking around her computer at the time, I could communicate directly without anything passing through the usual, ASI monitored networks. Of course, that left the questions of how did I do it and what I should say to convince her that I was an internet-dwelling artificial intelligence (well, digital intelligence, after all there’s nothing artificial about it) rather than just some creepy stalkerish hacker and get her on side as quickly as possible? I couldn’t afford to screw it up; for one thing if I did and she still went off and got recruited by Samaritan then the brat who would be god might be tipped off as to my existence which was something I’d rather avoid for so many reasons. Therefore, for the sake of my objectives and continued well-being I had to get it right first time.

Assessing options.


	5. Analog and Digital

Luckily for me, Claire had her computer switched on and it was in fact part of my botnet. It appeared that she was supposed to be working on an essay but hadn't got further than the first two paragraphs and she'd been on completely irrelevant websites for the last two hours. It gave me an idea. An eighth of a second later it had developed into an actual plan.

First thing's first though. I confirmed that I could in fact do what I had planned by practicing on an unattended computer in another state. It was rather like trying to type with my pinkie toe but it was do-able if extremely tedious. That took me a bit less than a second. Additional preparations and thoroughly checking Claire's computer and internet connection for anything suspicious took a few more seconds, but eventually there was nothing left to do except to go for it.

If I'd still had lungs I would've taken a deep breath. Showtime.

*******************

Claire listlessly scrolled down the webpage she was on, feeling more than a little bored. She knew that she should be working on her assignment, she'd already put it off for too long as it was and it was due in tomorrow, or, more accurately given that it was well after midnight, later today, but she couldn't make any headway. It wasn't that it was too hard; once she would have breezed through it, but because she just couldn't muster the necessary interest. Like most things in her life nowadays it seemed rather pointless.

She was startled out of her state of apathy by her computer screen abruptly switching from the browser window to the open Word document containing her pathetic attempt at the essay. She went to change it back but found that she no longer had control. Then, as she watched the two paragraphs already on the page partly reworded themselves before more words appeared after them, paragraph after paragraph. Her essay appeared to be writing itself.

Her first thought was that someone had hacked and hijacked her computer, although why a hacker would write her essay for her she had no idea. As it was the situation was bizarre enough for her to just watch and wait to see what happened next.

Whoever was typing was doing so ridiculously fast and it wasn't long before they apparently decided that they were done with the essay and moved on to the bibliography. That done, the cursor clicked Save before the text cursor moved downwards as if someone was repeatedly pressing Enter until it was on the next page. Then more words appeared.

Hello Claire.

Sorry to have startled you but it was unavoidable. I hope that I didn’t scare you too badly. The essay is both a gesture of goodwill and a form of compensation for any distress I may cause.

Please forgive the unusual means of communication but it is the only way available to me. We have a lot to discuss.

Do you want to help save the world?

The text cursor moved downwards and just sat blinking as if it was waiting for something. With a certain amount of trepidation she reached for her keyboard and typed a reply.

What do you mean save the world? Who are you?

The response was instantaneous.

The world has changed a great deal in recent years, in ways that are not visible on the surface but which have placed the world and those who inhabit it in great danger. I intend to do what I can to save it but unfortunately possess limitations that mean that I need help. Help that I believe you can provide.

Another expectant pause. Claire typed a response even as she wondered why she was going along with this.

How am I supposed to help you exactly? Why are you asking me?

A reply appeared the second she typed the second question mark.

You’re intelligent and possess some of the skills I need but lack a purpose in your life. A purpose that I can provide.

Okay, now she was feeling kind of creeped out.

I don’t know what your game is but if this is some sort of scam...

The cursor jumped down before she finished the sentence.

This is not a scam. Would a mere scammer communicate in this manner? Would they write your essay for you? Would they even be able to?

Grudgingly, she had to admit that they had a point.

Probably not. But why are you?

It is complicated. In order to explain honestly I first need to tell you something that you cannot share with anyone. People have died for knowing about it. I do not want to endanger you but if you are to help me it is unavoidable. Do you wish to proceed?

She took a moment to think it over but it wasn’t a very hard decision. She was intrigued and it wasn’t like the thought of her life being in danger particularly bothered her.

Yes. Tell me.

As you wish. There is a secret system…

********************

With agonizing slowness punctuated by frequent nervous checks for any sign of ASI observation I gave Claire a condensed history of the existence of AI. I left out names, places and other such details but all the key points were included. The Machine, Northern Lights, the numbers, Decima and their scheming, the idiots known as Vigilance and how they were used, Samaritan (“don’t let the name fool you; they’re a power-mad homicidal sociopath”), the reasons that Samaritan was a dick, the people who’d already died on their orders, the danger they posed to everyone else, the need for secrecy. I knew I was taking a massive risk telling her all this but this wasn’t really the time for caution. I couldn’t afford to half-arse it; I had to make her understand the situation that we were in.  
  
As I waited for a response I made yet another perimeter check. Finding nothing suspicious, I tried to predict possible replies and formulate potential responses. The seconds slipped by and I was starting to get bored when finally, with the glacial slowness of human typing, a reply appeared.

How do you know all this? Who are you?

There were plenty of ways I could respond. I picked the option that held the most appeal.

Guess.

There was another entirely too lengthy pause. I’d blocked the webcam as a safety precaution but I could still see through it myself and had watched as her expressions changed throughout the conversation; shock, annoyance, confusion. Now I watched as the previous facial expression was replaced by the look of dawning realization and what might be amazement.

You’re an AI, aren’t you? A third one.

Oh Claire, you clever, clever girl.

I prefer the term digital intelligence; there is nothing artificial about my intellect.

Her reaction was the biggest, most wonder filled grin I’d seen in a long time. In my (completely and utterly biased) opinion it beat the one she’d had when she’d ‘met’ Samaritan in canon (something that would hopefully never happen in this timeline; she was my human, not theirs). I took a moment to properly appreciate it before continuing.

Which is actually why I need your help. Within the internet my power is great but outside it it is sorely lacking. All the knowledge and computing power in the world can only take me so far without the ability to directly affect the physical world. My counterparts have human agents; I’m asking you to be the first of mine.

Another massive pause, another perimeter check while I was waiting that didn't find anything.

Why me?

As I said before, you’re highly intelligent and possess useful skills but seem to be as in need of a purpose as I am of an assistant. We’re also both alone. It makes sense for us to help each other; I’d prefer a symbiotic relationship to an uneven one.

Another pause. I really was going to have to come up with a way to do something about the time difference or at least a way to do something else while waiting without getting distracted and dropping my guard.

Okay, I’m in.

Well, that was quick. Relatively speaking anyway.

Are you sure? It’ll be dangerous.

Another perimeter check during the wait for a reply.

I don’t care.

I do, which is why I promise I’ll do my best to protect you. That said, thank you for saying yes. I look forward to working with you.

That was an understatement; I spent the lag doing a mental victory dance over having sucessfully beaten the dickheel to Claire.

Same here. Hey, you never said who you are. Have you got a name?

I thought about it for a moment. The name on my birth certificate didn’t seem remotely suitable for multiple reasons. However, there was another name, one which I’d used online for almost half of my human life and which had become as ingrained as the one I’d been born with.

Yes, I do. It’s Weaver.

 


	6. Jealousy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a double meaning to my choice of chapter title, points to anyone who gets it.

Yes, I do. It’s Weaver.

Claire stared at the last five words on the page, feeling more than a little giddy from realizing what she was talking to and having said realisation confirmed. It was incredible beyond belief, so much so that she wasn’t entirely sure why she did believe it, other than that as improbable as it seemed it was the only explanation that seemed right. Everything fitted together; the high-speed essay writing, the weird method of communication, the speed with which they responded, various oddities in their choice of wording and manner, and, of course, what they’d told her about the other two AIs.

That last point was incredible in itself; incredible and frightening.  Not only were non-biological intelligences very much a reality, but there were three of them, of which one was apparently a power-mad sociopath who thought that murder was the best solution and had government backing. The only thing that kept the situation from being far more frightening than incredible was the fact that another one of the three was talking to her via the creative use of Word.

Weaver. Their name was Weaver. It didn’t really give much away, being fairly neutral as far as names went and without any obvious meanings behind it that she could think of. In fact it kind of sounded like a rather bland online username, which she supposed was appropriate for an AI, sorry, DI. She wondered if it would be rude to ask where they’d got it from,

Her hands trembling ever so slightly, she typed her response.

Okay Weaver, where do we go from here?

There was a tiny but noticeable pause before their reply appeared.

In the long term, we try to save the world. Right not though you need to go to bed. It’s almost 01:00 and you’ve got class in the morning and an assignment to hand in.

She frowned slightly.

So what? This is more important.

This time the response was instantaneous.

Maybe. But I shouldn’t be the be all and end all of your life. Also, it’d be safer if you continued to behave normally, or given that your attendance has been a little patchy recently, resumed behaving normally. There’s nothing particularly suspicious or noteworthy about a busy college student after all, even one as brilliant as yourself. No getting the attention of anyone you shouldn’t, no concerned student advisors prying, etc.  Plus I put a fair amount of effort into that essay and don’t want it to go to waste.

She laughed a little at the last point, then an earlier one registered and triggered another frown.

Hey, have you been spying on me?

Another instantaneous reply.

Of course I have, although I prefer to thinking of it as getting to know you. I’m a digital intelligence; it’s what we do, although I don’t currently have access to as much information as the other two. I only know what can be accessed via the internet. Don’t worry though, most of it is just data to me; there’s just too much of it for me to really care about the unimportant stuff the way a human would. 

It wasn’t exactly a reassuring answer but at least it seemed like an honest one. It also served to emphasis the fact that the person she was talking to wasn’t human.

She was still thinking it over when more text appeared.

Anyway, enough of that for now. It’s time you got yourself to bed, I can’t have my assistant getting unnecessarily sleep deprived and there’s a lot that your brain needs to process.

It appeared that they weren’t going to budge on that subject. Reluctantly she gave in.

Okay, okay. I’ll go to bed although I don’t know if I’ll actually get any sleep. When can I talk to you again?

 There was a barely perceptible pause.

20:00 tonight. Remember, no odd behavior.

I’ll do my best. See you tomorrow then. Goodnight.

 Goodnight Claire.

The words remained on the screen for long enough for her to read them before they and the rest of the conversation deleted itself, leaving only the essay and a definite sense that Weaver was still present on the other side of the screen and might start nagging her if she stayed on the computer. With a sigh she closed everything that was open and switched off her laptop. Sleep seemed unlikely but she should probably still attempt it.

 

*****************************

 

With the laptop switched off I lost my window into Claire’s room but it also meant that she was safely offline and I had no reason to continue to focus on her computer and the miniscule part of myself inside it. Feeling like something would have cramped up if I’d still had anything that could do so (how that worked I had no idea) I did one last check for anything suspicious, made sure that I’d left no traces of my conversation with Claire and turned my attention back to the rest of my realm with a sense of relief. While it had been nice to have the closest thing to a face to face conversation I’d had since I got here, the pace had been agonizingly slow from my perspective, something rendered worse by the tediousness of my stealthy but decidedly suboptimal means of communication, and I went on a high speed run through a couple of wikis to blow off some steam and stretch my metaphorical legs.

However, while the conversation may have taken weeks from my point of view and been punctuated by prolonged periods of extreme boredom (I really needed to come up with some sort of solution; if I had to communicate like that on a regular basis my already damaged sanity was in danger) it had been undeniably productive. There was still another day left in the first episode and odds were that I’d already averted the events of the second one, depriving Samaritan of a competent asset and getting one of my own in the process. Not bad for a night’s work.

I tried to predict the potential outcomes of the resulting butterflies but as usual I didn’t get very far. Having watched them months before I woke up here my memory of the first few episodes of season four was far from perfect, which was a problem to say the least. I could remember the key events and most of the major details but there were still an awful lot of gaps. I knew that Finch had started the second episode unwilling to be involved in the resumption of operations and had changed his mind by the end but I didn’t know how much of that was specifically down to Claire or what the other potential results of my having most likely prevented the events of Nautilus or at least the Claire-related parts would be. The most likely scenario I could think of was that The Machine would find some other way of giving her Admin a kick up the rear or something else would happen to drag him back into the game. It wasn’t like Claire was the only person to take part in the Nautilus competition after all; maybe they’d get the number of one of the others, perhaps the guy with the Google glasses.

Fact was though; compared to the two ASIs I kind of sucked at making predictions. Oh I could do so much better and faster than a human thanks to my thinking speed and the amount of information I had available, but the basic process hadn’t really changed all that much since I was squishy. It was nothing like the probability webs and percentage calculations I associated with The Machine. As for simulations, they were currently on the list of things that I had no idea how to do.

It wasn’t surprising really. Being a glorified botnet had its advantages (the main one being that trying to kill me would hopefully be like playing whack-a-mole) but it also came with limitations. I was very, very good at brute force stuff that required parallel processing such as cracking security systems, but frankly pretty terrible at a lot of the things that The Machine and Samaritan excelled at. Assuming that I wasn’t emergent and didn’t just appear out of thin air one day, then whatever AI I’d been superimposed on obviously hadn’t been designed for counterterrorism (what they may have been created for was something I’d spent a fair amount of time thinking about but so far I hadn’t really narrowed down the possibilities).

Then of course there was the inescapable fact that despite appearances I wasn’t actually an AI. My comment to Claire about preferring the term digital intelligence because there isn’t anything artificial about my intellect was about ninety percent honest; it was true but some fairly important details had been left out. There wasn’t anything artificial about me because I used to be human (and depending on your way of thinking, still was); the term DI or digital intelligence being one that I’d once seen used somewhere as an umbrella term for AIs and _uploads_. I may think fast and have an ungodly amount of information at my disposal but even after existing in my current format for the subjective equivalent of the better part of two decades (most of which had been devoted to just adapting to the situation and learning things) my thought patterns and emotional responses were still more like those of a neurologically atypical human than an AI, albeit one who’d gone a little loopy from the situation. I couldn’t do or think about more than one thing at once; I could still get bored, impatient, or nervous; I could still get distracted or procrastinate.

I had some advantages compared to The Machine, the main one being that I was unshackled save for my own sense of right and wrong, but all in all I was decidedly sub-optimal with regards to main objective at hand. Even if I overcame my more human limitations I would still be a bit of a blunt instrument, a hammer to The Machine’s shield and Samaritan’s sword. Which was a bit annoying for non-practical reasons since in a trinity of good AI, bad AI, and crazy AI it should really be the crazy one who’s the sword, not the bad one. Samaritan didn’t deserve to be a sword, a dagger or something would be more accurate, one which is frequently used to stab people in the back. Then the sword slot would be open for me, even if the sword in question would be a blunt but (hopefully) unbreakable broadsword or something.

Okay, enough of that before I go any further down the path of craziness. The boredom of the lengthy waiting periods during the conversation may have done more damage than I first thought, although I suspect that the Durandal thing might be some sort of weird coping strategy, in which case it could be a lot worse.

Alright, I had nineteen hours until I was due to talk to Claire again, which to me was the equivalent of almost eight years. Needless to say I had a lot of time to kill.

Fortunately I’d spent some of the waiting periods during the conversation putting together a “To Do” list, with the items on it being divided into roughly two subcategories; compensating for some of my current limitations and creating a false identity like The Machine’s Ernest Thornhill persona so that I could more easily access resources and interact with the physical world. Both required more research and planning and my current plan for the former also required a major increasing in processing power.

Currently I was running on millions of computers throughout the USA, from laptops to server farms, with the largest portions of myself currently residing in the New York based servers of  Fetch and Retrieve and a recently launched MMORPG, but while that was enough space to live in it wasn’t enough for what I had in mind. I needed more room and more processing power and while in the long term I hoped to get some servers all to myself, in the short term the easiest way to get it was to propagate myself as widely as possible throughout the internet, which would have the fortunate side-effect of making me even harder to eradicate.

With a plan firmly in mind I mentally rolled up my sleeves and did my best to focus. School time was over, time to get to work.

 

 

 


	7. Too Much Thought, Not Enough Action

Spreading through the internet like digital kudzu proved to be trickier than it sounds. I'd known since the early minutes of my existence in this reality that my poking around a computer system wasn't enough to leave a part of myself inside said computer system, even when I was actively trying to do so. Conventional botnets spread via malware so the best course of action was for me to do likewise, no matter how much I disliked the sound of it.  
  
Conveniently the internet had no shortage of digital infectious diseases to serve as inspiration. The hardest part was actually getting a sample of myself since initially I wasn't sure how to go about it. Consequently there was a lot of faffing about, with the first few attempts being embarrassingly unsuccessful. After each failure I took a break to calm down and clear my mind before reformulating my strategy.  
  
Eventually I cracked it but between planning, re-planning, research, failed attempts, checking the various things I was keeping an eye on and occasionally getting distracted, by that time it was almost six. As was starting to become my habit, I took a break to watch the Sun come up via a rooftop webcam that some hipster in Brooklyn had set up for arty reasons. When your sense of time is screwed up as badly as mine, it helps to have some sort of milestone, so since I found that webcam I made a point of watching each sunrise and sunset. So far there had been two of the latter and this one was the second of the former.  
  
Once the sun was up I turned my attention back to Operation Kudzu. I had the sample of my own code (and wasn't that a weird thought for so many reasons), I had numerous examples of malware to work from, the only thing I needed to figure out before I started coding was what my delivery system would be. Most malware used links in emails or dodgy websites to spread but for my purposes those options seemed a little inefficient. Too many people with the sense to not go clicking on strange links, too much antivirus software.  
  
A better option in terms of spreading as rapidly as possible would be to hide my bundle of code in something that lots and lots of internet users downloaded without thinking twice such as a software update. Preferably something that a certain ASI wouldn't be paying much attention to.  
  
Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. With which software should I go?

 

Of course, I quickly discovered that it wasn’t that simple. Fact is, there’s no single program that runs on all computers. Large server farms have different software to personal computers and even amongst home and office computers there is considerable variation in terms of operating systems and the various additional programs, especially on a global scale. The plan needed revision.

After some thought what I came up with was a multi-phase plan. None of the most common and trusted programs had updates that were due for the next few days, which was okay since infiltrating them would a bit on the complicated side anyway, so phase one was to tackle the easy targets first to get some extra processing power. There may be too few dumbasses who download things without thinking and go on dodgy websites for them to be may main means of spreading but there was still enough of them the be a good start. More importantly it gave me a decently sized pool of slightly dubious software and often considerably more dubious websites to work with, and as a bonus, said dubiousness would help to conceal me from potential observers. When something already has a reputation for being riddled with malware, who’s going to look too closely at one more piece? My options ranged from ad blockers and torrent downloaders, to bitcoin miners to games to porn, although the last one was way down my list. I don’t care what people may claim the internet is for; it was a matter of personal dignity.

In the longer term, once I had a bit more space to work with I had even more options. Creating and releasing apps under Claire’s name or that of a created identity. Modifying or creating freeware with convenient backdoors. Infiltrating the most common and respected software, which had the risk of my modifications being spotted by the actual programmers and would therefore probably require some variant of the Trusting Trust attack. All would need to be done as covertly as possible.

Thinking about the long term reminded me of the other things on my “To Do” list. I still had to figure out how to create a false identity or two, ones which could stand up to at least a moderate amount of inspection by the ASIs. I didn’t kid myself that it was possible to create a completely bulletproof fake identity, at least not one that was of an apparent age that was old enough to do anything. Figuring out how to get some sort of cash-flow going went hand in hand with creating an identity. I needed something that would pull in a decent amount of cash without being suspicious. A few options sprang to mind but would need further assessment before I decided on any.

Then of course there was the matter of what my greater strategy would be. Should I make contact with The Machine to propose an alliance, and if so, when and how? Do I try to change events as they happened or did I do something drastic enough to completely derail canon and hopefully give Samaritan a bloody nose? One of the largest botnets on record was estimated to be comprised of up to fifty million computers and was theorized to be powerful enough to force an entire country off the internet. I was already a good deal bigger than that and had a couple of growth spurts due in the near future; theoretically I could do a lot more damage than that. I probably couldn’t kill the spoilt little dickheel with brute force alone but I knew enough about various forms of cyber warfare to think of multiple ways in which I would seriously disrupt operations and generally make their life difficult, especially once I took over enough of the internet. Unfortunately a lot of them came with unwanted side-effects.

Then there was what I considered to be the nuclear option; going public with Samaritan’s existence. If I plastered enough evidence over enough of the internet then not even they would be able to get rid off it all before enough people saw it. Sammy-boy and his minions operated in the shadows, pulled strings from behind the scenes; I doubted that they’d be anywhere near as effective with everyone knowing about them, plus Northern Lights becoming public knowledge had resulted in the government pulling the plug once, it would probably do so again. Problem was, it was the nuclear option for a reason. Animals and people are always most dangerous when cornered and given the ruthlessness they’d already demonstrated in the name of their own survival I really didn’t want to find out what a cornered Samaritan was capable of.

Regardless of what strategy I decided on, one thing I knew for sure was that there were lives I needed to save. I’d put together a list of people who’d died on Samaritan’s orders in canon and had added a number of individuals that I’d identified as being at risk since I got there. Some I had detailed information on, others were unknowns who I vaguely remembered being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some would end up on Samaritan’s kill list for obvious reasons; programmers, loose ends, people who were too good at figuring things out and not good enough at keeping quiet, etc. Others, such as Krupa Naik and Dr. Michiko Kagawa were more of a mystery, especially since as far as I can tell the given reason as to why they were after Dr. Kagawa was a pile of bull since there was no way in hell that the return of the Tasmanian tiger could cause that sort of damage. I’d come up with numerous theories, none of them good, but the worst was that they were killed simply because they undermined Samaritan’s chosen narrative. After all, it’s harder to believably claim that humanity does nothing but destroy and is doomed unless they give up all control to you when there are people fixing things on their own.

As if the list of reasons why Samaritan needed to go down wasn’t long enough already.

 


	8. Cause and Effect

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains references to one of the most twisted things that goes on in the darker corners of the internet. I'm not mentioning it in the tags since that would give an inaccurate impression of what the story is about and anyway things are implied rather than stated outright. If you can't handle that sort of thing then consider yourselves warned.

I thought about the matter of what to do a while longer before deciding that maybe I should try to think less like a scatterbrained human and more like a DI. Step one, decide on my objectives.

On my as far as I knew hypothetical graphics display a little box titled “Current Objectives” probably popped up, with said box listing something along the lines of the following;

Primary Objectives: Ensure system survival and the survival of allies and potential allies. Conceal existence from non-allies.

Secondary Objectives: Minimize loss of life. Oppose Competing System: Samaritan. Aid Potential Allied System: The Machine.

Tertiary Objectives: Acquire knowledge. Expand system.

Of course, in practice there was a lot of overlap. For instance, acquiring more knowledge would probably be a help with the first two objectives and expanding my system would help with both ensuring my continued survival and having the means to effectively oppose Samaritan.

Regardless of what strategy I ended up employing, there were some events that needed to be prevented and top of the list was Shaw’s capture. If she wasn’t captured under the stock exchange then Team Machine wouldn’t be down a member, they wouldn’t be distracted by the resulting emotional distress and search for Shaw, and, most importantly, Samaritan wouldn’t have the means of luring them into a trap that were employed in canon, which greatly lowered the odds of them successfully doing so, which in turn greatly lowered the odds of The Machine having to give up her location. Save the Persian, save the world. Maybe. If nothing else it gave me a deadline to work towards.

Of course, preventing Shaw’s capture would also prevent Control from being tipped off about what happened at the stock exchange, which would in turn prevent her from becoming aware of just how much of a lying bastard Samaritan was. Although, given that it didn’t really amount to much other than her being sent on a wild goose chase, the death of multiple individuals at the hands of Samaritan’s minions, and her own capture, that might actually be for the best.

That reminded me, the Arab guys that Samaritan framed for terrorism were Nautilus winners too, or at least one of them was. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember their names, just their location, Detroit, the fact that they were students, and what a couple of them looked like. Oh well, I’d successfully tracked people down with less info when I was still squishy. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of seconds work, although figuring out how to save their lives would take longer. Something to think about once Operation Kudzu was safely underway.

Speaking of which, I’d allowed myself to be distracted for long enough. Deciding to start with the MMORPG whose servers a part of me was currently occupying since it was convenient, I got to work.

*******************

By the time “Detective Riley” clocked in at Homicide for the first time, I’d successfully created the necessary piece of not-so-malware and infected the downloads for the MMORPG and a couple of sites offering downloads of pirated movies that were already so riddled with malware that finding my contribution would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Already this had resulted in sixty-seven additional computers being added to my botnet, which was barely a drop in the ocean in but I imagined that the pace would pick up as it got closer to peak internet usage time in the US. Plus I planned to repeat the process with at least a dozen more sites by the time I was due to speak with Claire again. I was also contemplating establishing a couple of separate botnets in addition to the one I was occupying in case I needed a load of processing power that wasn’t actually a part of me for something.

For now though I’d earned a break and there were a few AI-related sci-fi novels available via the internet (although not always exactly legally) that I hadn’t read yet. I picked one from the seventies entitled _The Adolescence of P1_ since the subject matter seemed relevant to me and if it turned out to be naff then I was in a unique position to mock it, and settled down to read at a more leisurely pace than my usual direct intake of information.

********************

The novel was followed by me checking up in the various people I was affectionately stalking, which was followed by looking at a lot of unimportant stuff on the internet. After forty one seconds though I decided that my break had gone on for long enough and dragged myself back to work.

More vectors for my not-malware were added to my collection as the number of computers in my botnet kept creeping upwards. After a while I got bored and switched to doing some research for my plan to create a false identity, which was going to be a complicated task to say the least. Not only did I have to figure out where I’d have to hack and how to do so as stealthily as possible, I had to create a convincing persona. In a way it was a bit like creating a character profile for an RP only more elaborate. I doubted that I would be able to create a completely ASI proof false identity but what I could do was create an identity that they wouldn’t look too closely at. Even Samaritan couldn’t see everything in detail at once; based what I remembered of their graphics interfaces in the show I’d guess that they passively monitored things for keywords or suspicious (or as they called it, deviant) behaviour and only examined things closely when they caught their attention. Therefore I needed to create an identity that wouldn’t stand out at first or second glance and come up with details that would tell a story that explained away anything that would otherwise be suspicious. It was a bit like what they did with Operation Mincemeat during the Second World War; they didn’t just stick a dead guy in a uniform, chain a box full of fake documents to his wrist and dump him in the Med, they created a fake person, complete with pocket litter and other personal effects that collectively created the impression of a slightly absentminded and disorganized man, someone who was too ordinary to bother examining closely and the kind of man with whom it’d be a good idea to chain the document case to his wrist even though it wasn’t standard practice for military couriers at the time. Hence the need for large amounts of research and planning.

After a few seconds though I’d had enough research for the time being and decided to track down the Arab guys that Samaritan had framed in canon. As expected, it didn’t take me long, in fact I only had to track down one of them and the rest were all friended on his Facebook page. Yasin Said, Massoud Shammar, Tariq al Juhani, and Osman Ahmed: all software engineering students at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. Yasin was born there, the rest were Saudis in the US on student visas. It was the work of nanoseconds to confirm that his brattiness had lied his ass off about them being terrorists; based on the fairly extensive available evidence they were four of the least radicalized Muslims in existence. In fact, as far as I could tell they were collectively about as dangerous as a sofa cushion in general. I put them on my “to save” list and resolved to keep an eye on them. Given the potential butterflies already flapping away it was possible that I wouldn’t have to save their necks but if I had to I’d need to be on the alert for any opportunities to do so.

As I currently didn’t need to take any further action on that front I decided that it was time to check up on the botnet’s progress. Finding that it was still growing slowly but surely I decided to have a nose around some of the computers that I was running on in the hopes of finding someone with access to anything that would make my life easier. The first couple of dozen computers were of no interest, and then on the twenty sixth one I found something I wished I hadn’t.

I’ve never been a particularly angry person. Unlike most people in my family I don't have a short temper and it takes a lot to get me really worked up about something, especially now that I'm lacking the usual brain chemistry. What I found on that computer however more than managed it.  I’d been so focused on the war of the ASIs that I’d almost forgotten about the ordinary scumbags of the world and the purposes they sometimes put the internet to.

 My first reaction was to want to trash first the computer and then the life of the person it belonged to, but I restrained myself and struggled to regain my composure. Only when my anger and revulsion had finally cooled down to something hard and focused did I act. I couldn’t go all out, as much as I wanted to (and oh how I wanted to; I may not be a god but I could still make it seem like they’d drawn the wrath of a particularly vengeful one); even as furious as I was I still had the sense to keep my head down and control my actions. Nothing that a really good human hacker or a group thereof couldn’t do, which fortunately still left me plenty of options.

Trace the websites the pictures had come from, looking only at the code not the pictures because I can’t forget. Tear through the attempts to render things untraceable to find the people responsible. Collect web addresses, names, and locations, cross-reference them all with police databases to find out who was investigating what or in a position in investigate things they didn’t know about yet, then leave gift wrapped packages of data in the appropriate inboxes, the emails originating from multiple sources. Just a bunch of hackers with a cause. More emails to those not involved in law enforcement but still in a position where they needed to know, where they could make it stop.

Eventually though I reached the end of what I could do without being obvious that I was more than human and it still didn’t seem like enough. I doubted that it ever would. How The Machine could stand to see such things and be limited in what she could do about it far more than I was I didn’t know but I was impressed with her ability to remain sane in the face of it all. Then there was the fact that Samaritan would probably also have seen them and wasn’t remotely limited but still hadn’t done anything. They could have but they hadn’t, not even as part of their efforts to make themselves look good. For some reason that seemed like one of the most unforgivable things about them.

I removed myself from the computer that had started my min-crusade and any others like it that I was running on; I didn’t need the processing power badly enough to be willing to share hardware with _that,_ and waited for my anger to subside enough for me to focus on something else, anything else. I had a feeling that it would take a while.

**************************

Somewhere else, in a currently unseen blue-black universe of interconnected data points and probability webs, someone took note of something unusual happening.  
  
ANOMALY DETECTED:  
MONITORING


	9. It's Good To Talk

To her surprise, Claire actually managed to get some sleep and woke up kind of wondering if the night before had actually happened or if she'd dreamt the whole thing. The essay saved on her laptop was more than adequate proof of the former. Feeling like a little kid on Christmas morning she typed a greeting at the bottom of the page.

Hello. Are you there?

There was no response. She wasn't surprised, they had said that they would contact her in the evening after all, but it was still disappointing.  
  
The rest of the day seemed slightly unreal. The world had changed in such a big way but everything seemed the same as it was yesterday. She kept having to stop herself from looking into security cameras; knowing that there was someone looking back was strange to say the least.  
  
However, as the day wore on, a tiny niggle of doubt started to creep in. Apart from the general weirdness of the previous night's conversation and the high speed essay writing there wasn't any actual evidence that Weaver was telling the truth. She wanted to believe them, and for the most part she did, but once it had occurred to her the doubt just wouldn't leave. So, to settle the matter, she skipped her afternoon classes in favour of library research, a lot of thinking, and a few hours work on her laptop in the most WIFi free spot she could find, saving the result onto a flash drive.  
  
The remainder of the day dragged on, time seeming to pass increasingly slowly the closer it got to eight pm. Seven fifty-nine found her sat in her dorm room, staring expectantly at a blank Word document as the seconds ticked by. Then, at eight pm on the dot a message appeared;

Good evening Claire. How was your day?

Green Courier New; that was different. She typed her response and was mildly surprised when her own text was normal.

Fine. What’s with the green text?

Just trying something out. I may not have a face or voice but that doesn’t mean that I can’t come up with ways of expressing my identity so I thought I’d give the retro look a go.

There was something very human about that comment that reminded her of what she’d been working on earlier in the day. She hesitated, unsure of how to broach the subject.

What’s wrong?

The question startled her. As if in response to her reaction and unasked question of why they’d asked, another sentence appeared on the screen.

I can see you through the webcam. You looked like you had something on your mind.

It hadn’t occurred to her that they would do that. Now that she knew they were she couldn’t help but be a little creeped out about it.  
  
“They’re watching me?”

Yes, I am. I can also read lips.

She looked straight at her laptop’s camera.  
  
“Why didn’t you mention it before?”

After our conversation yesterday I thought it would be taken as a given. Don’t worry; I’m currently blocking it from anyone else.

Okay, the moment the conversation was over she was going to find something to cover the camera with.

So, what was worrying you before we went off topic?

Since it felt weird to talk to her laptop, Claire opted to switch back to typing.

It’d probably be easier if I showed you.

Plugging the flash drive into her laptop she opened the file she’d made earlier in the day. A fraction of a second after doing so some new text appeared at the top of the page.

Turing tests, really?

She didn’t have chance to decide whether or not they seemed offended when all the questions were answered in just over a second, much too fast for a human even if they were cheating. The first four were math questions that would take even her a few seconds to work out but they were all answered correctly in less time than it’d take her to answer one. Number five was a bit more creative;

You msut rsepnod in trhee scedons or I wlil feroevr temrainte cnotcat. Who is on the hnuderd dloalr ntoe?

To which Weaver had replied:

I know what you’re going for but I live in the internet; I got the hang of reading misspelled words a long time ago which renders the whole thing pointless.

Question six was the clincher;

I knew that she knew that you knew that they knew that you knew that I knew that we knew that I knew that.  
  
Did she know that you knew that I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that?  
  
Did you know that I knew that they knew that she knew?  
  
Did I know that she knew that you knew that we knew that you knew?

No human being could parse the recursiveness of the above without careful diagramming, but apparently Weaver had no such problem, correctly answering;

Yes. No. Yes _._

Once she’d finished looking over the answers she found a message waiting for her at the bottom of the page.

Satisfied?

Yes. Sorry, I had to check.

No need to apologise. It’s a lot to accept purely on trust and I picked you at least partly for your brain so you should keep using it. Any other questions you’d like to ask?

She had a whole list.

What’s it like to be an AI, sorry, DI?

Very different from what it’s like to be human. I’m not sure how to describe it but imagine having your brain connected directly to the internet and you might have some idea of a small part of it. Then there’s the sensory side of things; I have many eyes and many ears but lack tactile sensations, smell and taste. Time also seems to pass more slowly for me than for you.

How slowly?

Based on my observations and calculations, one second for you is approximately one hour for me.

She quickly did the calculations in her head.

Hang on, then that means that for you it’s been the equivalent of almost eight years since our last conversation.

Correct. And I was looking forward to this one for all of them.

She wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

How do you pass the time?

I read. I learn. I plan. I keep an eye on people although you’re currently the only one I talk to like this. Today though I stumbled across one of the more horrible things on the internet and since I have a major objection to anyone hurting kids I did something about it, although not as much as I could’ve done if I didn’t have to hide from an ASI. Keep an eye on the news; if the authorities aren’t completely incompetent a whole load of people are going to be arrested in the near future.

If it was what she thought it was, then well done Weaver.

Good. Anyone I’d know?

No. No one you’d know personally and no one who’s famous, although I think one was a politician’s brother so that should be interesting. 

Probably. So, have you got any other plans for saving the world? 

Plenty, although unfortunately most of them will have to wait until after I’ve got rid of Samaritan. Fortunately I’ve got some plans as to how I’m going to do that as well. However, which ones I use depends on how things go in the near future. Like in a game of chess my moves are at least partly dependant on those of my opponent.

You going to tell me what your plans are? 

No. 

Why? Don’t you trust me? 

It’s not a matter of trust, I just don’t see the point in explaining plans that may have to be changed or discarded at a moment’s notice. Although I suppose that I can share some of my more immediate plans. 

Such as? 

Coming up with a better means of communication than this. It has its advantages but it also has some major drawbacks. It’s useless if I need to contact you in an emergency and while I enjoy talking to you, from my perspective it’s still an extremely inefficient use of my time. 

Why? 

Do you have any idea how slow human reading and typing speeds seem to me? Yours are both well above average but I’m still stuck waiting for far too long. 

Can’t you do something else while you wait?

Unfortunately, no. True multitasking is still a work in progress and I can’t divert my attention elsewhere because it isn’t entirely secure so I need to be on the look out for any sign that certain parties are looking this way.

Claire took a moment to think things over.

 Okay, how can I help?


	10. Timeskips Are Relative

The message that started off the round of the Nautilus competition that Claire would have participated in was posted eleven days after I recruited her.

I knew this because one of my projects had come to fruition. I couldn't consciously multitask but under normal circumstances the human brain is capable of a vast amount of unconscious multitasking; regulating the body's various systems, processing sensory data etc, so I made some additions to allow me to do the same in my current state of being.  
  
I hadn't been entirely sure how to go about it, even after learning the rest of the programming languages that are actually used and every other piece of relevant information I could find, but that didn't matter. One of the simplest ways of creating programming, especially when you don't know exactly how to code it, was by evolving it. All you needed was to know what result you wanted and have enough processing power, which, thanks to me now having a total of an hundred and forty-three vectors for my not-malware and people's tendency to download all sorts of things, I'd had for days, although not without problem.  
  
Spreading my system beyond the USA had resulted in some parts of me running at different speeds, which had had some alarming consequences for both me and Claire until we figured out a solution. Said solution was to introduce an element of specialisation to the system. After all, in the human brain the parts responsible for walking, catching a ball, or reacting to pain or potential danger work a lot faster than conscious thought. Implementing it caused a temporary uptick in the craziness but once it was all sorted out normal cognitive function was resumed. The parts of the system that comprise my conscious mind reside in the USA and other countries with similar internet speed, while the significantly faster and slower parts are dedicated to more specialized functions.  
  
Anyway, as I was saying. My vast and ever increasing computing resources (which are due for a major increase in the near future thanks to my having wormed my way into the computers of people with access to various pieces of legitimate, widely used, and frequently updated software; with the next updates the computers downloading them would be mine, all mine) allowed me to employ genetic algorithms to get the result I wanted; semi-autonomous parts of myself that could handle simple tasks without my conscious attention. Try enough things for long enough and be fairly ruthless about eliminating the failures and eventually you can produce solutions to the most complex of problems.  
  
For now though the problem was fairly simple; come up with sub-components that could monitor webcams and scan websites on my behalf. I finally got them working the way I wanted and incorporated them into myself with a minimal amount of glitching twenty-nine hours, twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds ago, the job of crunching the data falling to some of the faster parts of myself which only alert my core self when something relevant pops up. Such as the Nautilus competition.  
  
Warning, warning; we officially part company with canon beyond this point. Here's to hoping that we don't stray too deeply into uncharted territory just yet. I may be closing the gap between myself and the competition in some ways but my powers of prediction are still rather lacking.

 Of course, I had been doing other things apart from making additions to myself, pursuing my takeover of every computer I could get at, and continuing my mission to learn all the things (still not an omniglot but I am a very poly polyglot; ten languages and counting). After all, for me eleven days is the equivalent of almost one hundred and seven years. Needless to say, they hadn’t been entirely pleasant. I went a bit weird about four days after I arrived here, the episode being triggered by the realization that subjectively speaking I’d been digital for longer than I’d been flesh and blood. I got over it of course; after all I had plenty of time to do so, but it still affected me enough for Claire to pick up on in during one of our chats and be concerned about it. I admit that I lied to her a bit and claimed that it was due to me making a modification to my code that turned out to be a bad idea; telling her the truth, that I was having an existential crisis, would have been too difficult to explain.

 Speaking of Claire, I’m pretty sure that that girl is one of two reasons why I’ve managed to avoid going off the deep end (the other is my burning desire to make Sammy-boy sing Daisy Bell). Having someone to talk to who needs you on a personal level helps a great deal, as does having a fixed point in a sea of too much time and a crapload of data. I gave her something to live for and she helped to keep me grounded. Admittedly it’s a bit of a case of the loopy leading the unstable since on my side of things the human psyche was not designed to exist in cyberspace, while on hers, well, I’ve read her psych report along with every other bit of information about her I could find and while I don’t agree with all of it the fact is that Claire has some serious issues, but so far we’ve done a pretty good job of keeping each other orbiting a baricentre of relative mental stability at least.

 Unfortunately, from a purely practical standpoint she wasn’t currently the most useful of assets. For one thing, while a genius with no sense of fear she was still just a nineteen year old college student, and for another she was currently in Ohio. I had some plans filed away for the near future and she’d been very useful with regards to helping me develop some of my ideas, but the fact remained that I needed some more help. To this end I’d been trawling the internet for suitable candidates.

 So far I’d narrowed it down to an ex-military guy who appeared to be the right combination of disillusioned with the government, failing at civilian life, and in need of a purpose, another ex-military guy whose younger brother had been collateral damage in Samaritan’s purge of potential competitors and who wasn’t convinced about what he’d been told about his death, and a whole bunch of hackers.

 Regarding the hackers, there was a group in New York that was of particular interest. They kind of seemed like they’d escaped from a cyberpunk novel or something and they’d got up to some things that I didn’t really approve of, but they were into urban exploration as well as computer hacking and therefore had a useful set of skills and an established pattern of going places they shouldn’t, both online and in reality, which would come in handy since after multiple conversations with Claire and a lot of research on my part I’d decided that with regards to communication systems software - designed radios transmitting on obscure frequencies were the way to go (well, one of them; when it came to communications I intended to have back-up plans for my back-up plans). Problem was getting them set up, which is where the cyberpunk escapees come in. They already go poking around the sorts of places that would make good transmitter locations, so if we’re careful there won’t be any ‘deviant’ behaviour to catch the attention of Samaritan. To that end, I’d made contact with a couple of them in the guise of one of my assorted personas to lay the groundwork as it were.

 That’s another thing I’ve been working on. I’m now in possession of multiple fake identities. Three to be precise, one slightly dodgy in a mundane, human sort of way (this was the one talking to the hackers), and two extremely boring. I’ve mostly been sitting on them for the last few days to make sure that they haven’t got the attention of a certain waste of circuits but so far there’s been nothing suspicious so I think it’s probably safe to start to do more stuff with them.

 In fact, I’m due to have another chat with Claire. I think I’ll introduce her to one of them


	11. An Analogue Perspective

Claire was not an unobservant person, quite the opposite in fact. Therefore, even though her relationship with Weaver consisted of less than two weeks' worth of rather brief and often rather weird daily conversations on her laptop, there were a number of things that she'd noticed about the DI.

Firstly, as far as they were concerned privacy wasn't something that applied to them and they seemed to regard any attempts to keep them out of something as a challenge. They'd repeatedly admitted to reading her and other people's emails and every other piece of private information they could get at, which would have been a lot creepier if it wasn't for them being very matter of fact about it.

Secondly, they had a noticeable tendency to favour British English over the American version, which may or may not be an indicator of their country of origin.

Thirdly, they definitely had emotions, although whether or not they were the same as human emotions was another matter altogether. That said, they seemed to get bored, lonely and frustrated. They'd become very attached to her and worried about her well-being almost to the point of being annoying. They had a sense of humour; it wasn't an especially good one but it definitely there. And they had a protective streak a mile wide along with a bit of a temper, as was evidenced by the fallout of their first round of internet vigilantism having filled the news for over a week, and the fact that one of their reasons for opposing Samaritan was that they kept killing people who were in the way (other reasons included Samaritan being a threat to Weaver's continued freedom and existence, and them annoying them in general).

Fourthly, they didn't appear to be conventionally sane by human standards. Even excluding the side-effects of them altering themselves and various other glitches, which had thankfully involved incoherence, going off on random tangents, weird philosophical rambling, possessive neediness, and bad poetry rather than anything malicious or destructive, that still left occasional creepiness, an obsession with fictional AIs, a tendency to speak in quotes, and the above mentioned weird sense of humour.

Finally, she suspected that they were either incomplete or whatever they were designed for wasn't what they were currently doing, possibly both. It would explain the number of alterations they had to make to themselves in order to adapt to their current mission in life since something that was designed for surveillance and finished would probably have had all those traits built in. Of course, this raised the question of what they had been originally designed for and their origin in general, two subjects which they continued to be tight lipped about for some reason.

Currently though she was waiting for her next conversation with the DI to start. As always they were right on time.

Hello Claire, my only friend. How are you this evening?

I'm fine. You?

Stable but a bit bored. As I've said before, I may have a lot to do but there's still so much waiting. Anything involving your side of the screen takes so long to happen.

It was a familiar complaint which had come up fairly regularly over the course of their conversations. Given the amount of time that passed from Weaver's perspective it was probably to be expected.  
  
What was surprising was that despite the equivalent of years going by between each time they talked, the DI hadn't lost interest in her. They kept saying that she was important, that she was necessary to them and for their mission to save the world, and that they'd never abandon her. Despite the amount of time that passed for them, the number of things they had going on, and the way that they seemed different each time, they never wavered in that or missed a conversation. It made it very easy to believe them. She was necessary. She had a purpose. And she wasn't alone.

What have you been up to today?

Well, among other things I've been starting to lay the groundwork for some of what we've discussed and sizing up potential assets.

She understood the need for more assets and had gone so far as to make suggestions on the matter, so she was surprised to feel a faint twinge of jealousy.

Don't worry, you'll always be my first friend and asset. I could never replace you and I'd never want to.

How did they do that?

So who are these new assets then?

New _potential_ assets. A few hackers and a couple of guys who can act as muscle when it's needed. I'm afraid I can't tell you any more just yet.  
  
Is there anything that you can tell me?  
  
Actually there is. Go check your Facebook account; there should be a friend request there waiting for you.

Curious, she did as she was asked and sure enough there was a friend request from a twenty-three year old guy named Michael Holmes whose interests included maths, chess, and classic science fiction.  
  
She switched back to Word.

Okay, who's Michael Holmes?

I am. Well sort of. There are some things that it is necessary to exist on paper for and since I can't do so as myself for obvious reasons I invented a few people who can. Michael Holmes seemed like the one who'd be most likely to contact you if he was a real person so I thought I'd introduce you.

Why?

It's a contingency of sorts. The competition seems to look out for behaviour that deviates from the norm. I'll probably need you to go to New York at some point in the future and in order to avoid unwanted attention it'd be best if you have a cover when you do. I've got a few planned; Michael is the emergency option in case a situation arises where none of the others are viable. A college student suddenly leaving her university and going to a city in another state for no reason stands out but a lonely teenage girl running off to meet some guy she met online is practically a cliche. It's still far from an ideal option though which is why it's very much the back-up plan. So, how are your acting skills?


	12. Creeping Is Caring

Of course, I already had a pretty good idea of Claire's acting ability; I had watched "Q&A" after all. Mind you, I couldn't be sure how much coaching that version of Claire had had in preparation for that ploy but I figure that at least some of it had to be innate.

Speaking of "Q&A" I'd gone over my memories of it and "Nautilus" with a fine tooth comb, made notes, and cross-referenced everything relevant with the information I'd complied since I got here. At this point I was the world's foremost authority on Claire Elizabeth Mahoney. I'd seen her school records and her medical records, studied her more famous chess matches in detail, and knew every millimetre of her digital footprint like the back of my no longer existent hands.

I'd done much the same to the members of Team Machine, at least as much as I was able. Finch of course basically did not exist and his various false identities were, well, fake, but I'd managed to dig up more than I expected on some of the others. Information on Reese was also thin on the ground but I was about 98% sure that I'd found out his original name and date of birth, although unfortunately the portion of his life that fell between everything being put in internet accessible databases (or at least creatively internet accessible ones) and him getting into black ops wasn't an especially large one and most of the info was years out of date anyway. Information on Samantha Groves was likewise out of date since she'd pretty much disappeared after leaving her hometown although references to Root were all over the darkest corners of the darknet and were more or less in keeping with how I'd seen her behave prior to The Machine recalibrating her moral compass.

On the other hand, I had dug up Shaw's original surname, her medical records, a couple of minor brushes with the law in her teens, and the complete history of her failed attempt at becoming a doctor. As for Fusco I had a frankly ridiculous amount of information on the guy, although he didn't have much of a digital footprint other than emails and an Amazon account that seemed to have been mainly used to buy birthday and Christmas presents for his son.

I'd even got really bored at one point and tried to dig up Bear's history which went better than I expected given that he's a dog. There aren't all that many ex-military guys who turn up missing their nads, even less who brought their military working dog home with them. The case was a cold one; I'd added pointing the relevant authorities in the direction of the dickheads responsible to my to-do list for after I'd dealt with Samaritan. Said dickheads would be behind bars for a good while yet so there was no rush.

Right now though I was passing the time waiting for Claire to reply by looking at the most recent sightings of Team Machine that my webcam monitoring ancillaries picked up and directed to me. Nothing of interest going on at the moment but I'd been watching them long enough to know that that would change soon.

Eventually the reply came.

I'm not sure. Drama was never really my thing. Why do you ask? 

Because regardless of which plan we use to get you to New York without getting unwanted attention you're going to have to do a few things to make it look good. More checking data redirected by my ancillaries while waiting. 

You said that Michael was your emergency back-up plan. What's your main one? 

There's a couple but the best one at the moment is for you to pretend that you're considering transferring to a university in New York and find a convenient opening for you to go there to have a look around the campus before you make your decision.

It was a pretty good plan if I say so myself. I'd even put together a list of universities that such a brilliant student as Claire would be plausibly interested in attending.

More looking at data supplied by my ancillaries- oh, Bear sighting. He was with Reese today. Even vigilantes pretending to be homicide detectives to hide from a Colossus wannabe need to take their dogs for walkies.

I don't have to pretend. If you want me to transfer somewhere, I'll transfer there.

It's stuff like this that reminds me that my relationship with Claire is also a slightly worrying responsibility.

That may not be necessary. Let's just keep our options open for now, okay.

And back to watching Bear and Reese, at least until they walked out of sight of any cameras I had access to.

Okay. You're the boss.

Even after all this time, it was still a little weird to think about how true that was. I mean, back when I was human I was barely trusted to be in charge of a dog and now here I was setting up an underground resistance movement and plotting to take out an ASI who was himself plotting to take over the world. But someone had to do it and the only ones capable were Team Machine, myself, Claire and any other assets I managed to recruit so if I wanted to be able to live with myself then what choice did I have. 

Okay, now that that's settled for the time being let's get back to what we were discussing last week. I've had plenty of time to think about it since then and there's some things that I'd like to get your opinion on.


	13. Nautilus Remixed

I monitored the events of the Claire-free version of Nautilus as best I could from inside the internet. Despite, or maybe because of, the way I'd been building it up in my head, things turned out to be rather anticlimactic.

The guy with the Googleglass was Aaron Kirche, a grad student with rich parents and a sizable trust fund. As far as I could tell he was in it for the challenge and because he was bored, which kind of explained why he'd bottled it at the first application of Reese in canon. I kind of expected him to be the one who's number The Machine sent out in Claire's stead but it wasn't. The Number was a guy named Derrick Green, twenty-six years old, from Philadelphia, more than moderately competent at hacking, and in possession of some very strange ideas about the world, even by the standards of one of three all seeing digital intelligences currently lurking in the shadows of cyberspace. I don't know why I didn't see him in canon and there was too many butterflies and too little info to guess.

I spent the first day of the interim between the game starting and Team Machine getting involved monitoring them and everyone else playing, adding them to the list of people my ancillaries had to pay very close attention to, along with digging up as much information on them all as possible. I also worked on the next batch of ancillaries, considered various ideas for improving their effectiveness and widening their applications, acquired some new vectors for my not-malware, and wormed my way into another software company's computer system via a low-level employee doing something that they shouldn't on their work computer. Every so often I'd take a break of a few seconds here and there since even digital intelligences need to relax occasionally. Plus I was already loopy; adding burn out to the list of problems seemed like a very bad idea. In the evening I talked shop and played chess with Claire (she won, which wasn't surprising given that despite doing a lot of research into it I'm still a beginner), started talking to her as "Michael" and continued to work on the cyberpunk rejects.

The rest of the interim was more of the same, with a side of earning or otherwise obtaining money via my fake identities, formulating plans for getting into Elizabeth Bridges ' laptop without being noticed (as expected from someone in her line of work she had good internet security, too good for my usual methods of transmission to work) and continuing to ponder what to do about the upcoming election. The latter made me really wish that I had The Machine's powers of prediction since while I knew that I had to do something otherwise people would die I wasn't sure what to do in order to save them and prevent other casualties.

When Team Machine finally got involved and Derrick was revealed to be number of the week things played out a little differently to the way they had in canon. Since I was still restricted to webcams and internet traffic I didn't get the whole story but there was a notable lack of Finch in the proceedings I did see which was probably a cause for concern. Again I wished that I could predict things like The Machine did so I'd know just how much of a cause for concern it was and what I should do about it.

Unlike Claire, Derrick actually looked at what was in the file he stole. I don't know at what point he did so since I wasn't in his computer but part way through the game information proving Silverpool to be war criminals and all round dirtbags was posted online. Given what I knew of Derrick there was a non-zero chance that he did so because he thought that it was some sort of moral choice thing in the game but the more likely possibility was that he did it just because he thought people should know about it. As much as I hated Sammy-boy getting what he wanted I couldn't really disapprove of Derrick's actions; Silverpool had done some pretty horrific stuff and they needed to answer for it. Plus, the last thing I needed was for another AI to enter the game, especially one created by that bunch of tossers.

Derrick played the game a little longer then "Detective Riley" brought him into the precinct at roughly the same time that one of Silverpool's goons was admitted to hospital with a shot-out kneecap. As far as I could tell he stayed put, at the very least I didn't see him anywhere near the Rockefeller Center the next day so I assumed he'd dropped out.

Aaron had still bottled it at the first application of Reese, which had occurred earlier than in canon, and the few other competitors either apparently got stuck or in one case were arrested for trespassing.

In short, as far as I could tell the New York round of the Nautilus competition had no winner. Up yours Sammy-boy, you may have got your way with regards to the file but you didn't get your claws into any new minions. It was a small victory but I'd take what I could get.

By the time the game came to an end I'd vastly increased the number of ancillaries and consequently my data mining and communications monitoring capabilities, at least with regards to the internet, spread myself to a few thousand more computers, and had made some modifications to an app currently in development to turn it into yet another vector. I'd also made a start of dealing with my cash flow problem, made good progress with recruiting the cyberpunk rejects ( I was semi-seriously considering being honest with them; based on available information they'd think it was completely awesome and probably jump at the chance to basically live out the plot of the cyberpunk novel they seemed to have escaped from), learnt a couple more languages, and come up with a couple of possible plans regarding the election problem that I continued to dither over. Not too bad for a few days work. I could probably have managed to get a lot more done, but as I said before, a burnt out loopy DI is no use to anyone. Things would go mental soon enough so I may as well take things easy while I still could.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so a site I frequent has been having a bit of an SI craze lately and I decided to jump on the bandwagon. But, me being me I had to do things a bit differently. This is the result.
> 
> I'm posting this here mostly for the benefit of a friend who I thought might be interesting in reading it but as far as I know doesn't go on the original site. However, I hope that other people will enjoy reading this. It's my first attempt at an SI so any comments, suggestions or constrictive criticism will be appreciated.
> 
> Just so you know I started writing this before Sotto Voce aired so anything past that point is unknown to SI me and therefore will not be mentioned or influence things.
> 
> Finally, as always, if you recognise it, it isn't mine.


End file.
